From a performance perspective, the VM is what dominates and Java operates closer to the VM assumptions about what it's going to run.
If you read the paper, you'll note that the Scala author significantly changed the structure of the algorithm to conform with the way Scala does things (recursion, etc). So it's sort of an apples-to-oranges comparison as far as Scala's concerned, too bad they couldn't write ugly Scala code that would give a better comparison.
If you read the paper, you'll note that the Scala author significantly changed the structure of the algorithm to conform with the way Scala does things (recursion, etc). So it's sort of an apples-to-oranges comparison as far as Scala's concerned, too bad they couldn't write ugly Scala code that would give a better comparison.